


Keep Wanting You

by elliebird



Series: Previously Posted Roswell, New Mexico Fic (2019) [1]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:28:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22766269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliebird/pseuds/elliebird
Summary: Set during 1x01. My take on the kiss.
Relationships: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Series: Previously Posted Roswell, New Mexico Fic (2019) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1636822
Comments: 7
Kudos: 40





	Keep Wanting You

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted on 1.26.19

Michael Guerin has been pissed at the world for as long as Alex has known him. 

Michael's anger is a part of him Alex had learned to accept, like the ragged scar between his shoulder blades and his absurd love of old horror movies. 

Being on the receiving end of it is new. 

Alex welcomes it. His own anger is still fresh. He’s getting used to the way it feels to carry it with him the way he’s still learning how to live with an artificial limb. 

Michael at twenty-eight has learned how to reign his anger in so it doesn’t destroy him. Alex can see it simmering beneath the surface, tightly leashed. 

Michael is different. 

As observations go, it’s inane. Alex has been through a war, learned how to live in a body he still doesn’t recognize and nursed himself through a bruised heart. He’s as different from his seventeen- year-old self as he and Michael have always been. Of course Michael isn’t the same person Alex left behind. 

Michael wears the years well. He’s leaner than he was at eighteen. He’s taken to wearing his hair longer. His jaw’s more defined, there are faint lines around his eyes and an intensity about him that Alex doesn’t remember being quite _this_. It’s magnetic. 

Michael steps into his space. And like the night he put a hand on Alex’s frantically beating heart and backed him against a decades-old museum display, Alex can’t breathe. 

He can’t look away. 

It doesn’t matter that they’re twenty-eight now. It doesn’t matter that it’s been ten years since whatever it was they were to each other, that Michael’s just as self-destructive as he was in high school. All Michael has to do is ask, with that quiet insistence Alex remembers so clearly, what Alex wants and he’s seventeen again, making decisions he shouldn’t be making. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Alex tells him. What he wants _doesn’t_ matter. It didn’t matter when, at eighteen, he let his father drag him to Albuquerque to enlist in the air force. If it had mattered then, Alex would have stayed. He would have stayed and his body would be whole. He wouldn’t need pills to get a decent night’s sleep. He wouldn’t have ten years of regret shadowing him. 

It’s the wrong thing to say. Or maybe the right, because Michael’s moving toward him with the look in his eyes Alex still sees in his dreams. The one Alex used to think about when his father was lecturing him about being a man. 

Michael used to look at him with a single focus, all of his bravado and bad-boy persona gone and only a raw hunger that made Alex feel like he was capable of anything. 

Alex is breathing shallowly, unable to look away or make himself turn and leave. Michael ten years older is devastatingly sexy. He’d mocked the cowboy thing, but fuck, Michael can still work it. His curls are a mess and he’s got a few days’ worth of scruff lining his jaw. His jeans hang off his hips like they were tailored to show off the muscles in his thighs and the cut of his hip bones. 

Being gay in the military means Alex has trained himself not to notice details like these. Like the pink shade of his lips and the width of his shoulders, the flex of his jaw and the heavy-lidded look Michael gives him as he makes his way towards him. Alex has always broken his own rules when it comes to Michael. 

Like no time at all has passed, like Alex hasn’t been irreparably changed by war and Michael’s still the same foster kid getting into fights and acing AP exams, Alex lets himself be pulled back into Michael’s orbit, moving into his space as Michael stops toe-to-toe, watching Alex with barely controlled hunger. 

Michael’s more intense. All of that reckless heat that used to simmer beneath the surface in high school and scare the shit out of Alex every time he caught a glimpse of it has been unleashed. Alex saw it at the ranch when Michael caught him peering into his Airstream, witnessed it in the taunting earlier in the evening. 

Alex’s breath catches the moment he knows for sure that Michael’s going to kiss him, that they’re going to say _to hell with caution_. Michael surges forward and it’s the same intensity of a fuse catching as it was the first time in the museum, the second against the bank of lockers in the darkened science wing and the night of senior prom, when they gave into months of desperation. 

Michael’s mouth covers his and the truth hits him in the depths of his being. He’s not over Michael Guerin. 

Alex spent years and three tours in Iraq trying to forget the way Michael made him feel. Two days in and everything Alex convinced himself was true is gone. In its place, an almost desperate desire he hasn’t felt for anyone since he left Roswell, and Michael, behind. 

Everything he’s taught himself, all the coping skills he learned in the last decade, vanish like they never existed. Compartmentalizing doesn’t work when Michael’s work-rough hands cup his face like Alex is someone worth being careful with. 

He can’t help but wonder what Michael would say if he knew the things Alex has done in the name of serving his country. What would his face look like if he could see the ruined flesh where an IED destroyed the lower half of his leg. 

When they were teenagers, Michael’s kisses made Alex weak in the knees, breathless and reckless, thinking of staying in this miserable town if only Michael would kiss him forever. They aren’t dumb kids anymore. They’ve lived life in the years since they would make out anyplace they could find. 

This kiss threatens to undo him completely. 

Michael slides a knee between Alex’s legs, anchors him close with a hand in the vulnerable small of his back and takes the kiss to eleven. He coaxes Alex’s lips open. Alex slips his arm around Michael’s waist beneath his jacket and gives Michael everything he’s got left in him. Most days, it doesn’t feel like much. Now, it feels like it could be enough. 

They break apart to catch their breath but Michael doesn’t let him go far. With his palms memorizing the shape of his face, Michael leans his forehead against Alex’s like it pains him to stop. 

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Alex quietly says, with the taste of Michael on his lips. Not because Alex is a good military boy or because he should be moulding himself into the kind of man a Manes man is supposed to be. Because the second Michael kissed him, all of Alex’s hard-won control dissolved. What’s left is a familiar ache, longing for Michael fucking Guerin like he’s falling in love for the first time all over again. He’s gotten good, painfully adept, at shutting himself off from his heart and the memories he buried. The longer he stayed away from Roswell, the easier it got. He should have known better. 

At seventeen, Alex wanted Michael Guerin more than he wanted anything, including his father’s approval. 

“Probably not,” Michael agrees. He doesn’t drop his hands or step away, angry or frustrated like he might have ten years ago. His mouth quirks in a crooked, bittersweet smile. “Can’t say I’m sorry for it,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. I'm on [Tumblr](https://elliebirdthings.tumblr.com/)


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